Joe Lieberman feels that as a Democrat, it's a good idea to launch a public attack on the party chairman. Why? Why the hell does he do this? Why is Joe Lieberman actively hurting the Democratic party? He knows the media salivates over the notion of a party member disagreeing with party leadership, and the GOP is smart enough to keep their disputes behind closed doors. But Joe Lieberman, seduced by the lights, camera, and ink can't wait to be the "maverick" once again, knifing his party in the back.

Maybe it's because even though Dean lost in NH, he kicked Lieberman's ass 26%-9%? Maybe it's for historical reasons - because Joe Lieberman did nothing to help Al Gore among the constituencies he was supposed to, and was perhaps a drag on the '00 ticket? Perhaps it's because his party took a look at him in 2004 and rejected him again, and again, and again, and again? (compare this to Wes Clark, who essentially just became a Democrat in 2004, yet consistently outpolled Lieberman and actually won a primary election)

Kos:

Now the writer is clueless if he thinks Lieberman is the most conservative member of the Dems senate caucus. Not even close. Ben Nelson, Max Baucus, Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, Byron Dorgan and Tim Johnson are all more "conservative" than Lieberman, who has a stellar record on some progressive issues.

But as many of us have noted ad infinitum, there's being a conservative Democrat, and then there's being a disloyal Democrat.

Biden bites his tongue and refuses to criticize Dean. Lieberman jumps at the bit. Biden is rewarded with a piece that is essentially about him, all the way through (and the dilemma foreign policy hawks face in the Democratic Party). Lieberman's entire role and purpose in the piece is to take shots at other Democrats.

Oliver:

At some point, it is no longer about policy. It isn't about disagreeing on one issue and agreeing on another. It becomes about what is best for a political movement, and that political movement's ability to move forward and create progress for a nation.

Biden could find little to say about Dean, other than this: â€œNo goddam chairmanâ€™s ever made a difference in the history of the Democratic Party.â€? His colleague Joseph Lieberman, who is perhaps the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus, said, â€œDean was wrong on the war and what he was talking about was bad for the country. Weâ€™ll see what he does as chairman. If he devotes his energies to building a party at the base, as he talked about doing, good for him. If he continues to be a prominent spokesman on defense policy, I would regret it.â€?

Lieberman is a study in the dangers of steroidal muscularity, becoming an outlier in his own party. (He has edged to the right as his running mate in the 2000 election, Al Gore, has moved leftward.) His fate was sealed with a kiss, planted on his cheek by Bush, just after the President delivered his State of the Union address. â€œThat may have been the last straw for some of the people in Connecticut, the blogger types,â€? Lieberman told me. But he is unapologetic about his defense of Bushâ€™s Iraq policy, saying, â€œBottom line, I think Bush has it right.â€? When I asked if he was becoming a neoconservative, Lieberman smiled and said, â€œNo, but some of my best friends are neocons.â€?

For a Democrat who wants to cultivate an image of toughness on national security, the challenge is to adopt positions that, in some cases, are closer to those of Paul Wolfowitz than to those of Edward Kennedy while remaining loyal to the Party.

Media Girl:

For me, there is no trigger. I've just never really cared for Joe. He was a bland VP candidate in 2000, offering nothing to the ticket besides a warm body. When Joe Lieberman opens his mouth, he speaks like he thinks himself to be FDR, though he lacks the white boater. But that's just a sin of style, and maybe I'm just being unfair to say he speechifies more like the railroad announcer at Disneyland. But let's face it, his voting record in the Senate is mixed at best. I don't know. I just feel like I cannot believe a single thing that comes out of his mouth. And then there's that hawkish attitude, that smarmy smirking self-righteous talk that tries to gloss over the fact that, in the end, he's really saying that might makes right.

Maybe every party needs its pariah, it's steaming example of all the things that the party opposes. Frankly, I don't care if Lieberman comes out as a Republican. (He doesn't care about us "blogger types," either.) It's the same difference -- Republican is as Republican does, as Forrest Gump taught us all.

The only thing is that if Lieberman changes party affiliation to match his loyalty, then Democratic Party funds could go to a candidate that actually would hold Democratic positions. As it is, the Democrats are funding an elephant in donkey's clothing, and if they continue to deny that, well, then they're just a bunch of turkeys. (And it will be the Republicans having Thanksgiving.)

Since Garry South came aboard Liebermanâ€™s campaign, he has steered the strategy into a two-person race between Lieberman representing the center-right DLC wing of the party, and Dean representing the center-left base of the party. This is the matchup that South apparently wants, as Lieberman no longer pays any attention it seems to Gephardt and Kerry. Again today, Lieberman trotted out his DLC talking points and warned that Dean and leftist Dems will lead the party to slaughter if they repeal the Bush tax cuts and act weak on defense and national security.

However, Lieberman is ignoring what recent polls point out: the base is fed up with the party for not being tough enough with Bush. In addition, while Lieberman carries the DLC banner, Dean is the only candidate with upward movement among Democrats....

Yet in Liebermanâ€™s appearances lately, especially today on Fox, he is providing the GOP with all of the video clips they would need to blast Dean as a tax-raiser on the middle class. Lieberman sounds a little frantic in his attacks, like a man who is watching the base, especially the young move away from the DLC center of the party he is trying to occupy, and towards Dean.

Make no mistake: the battle between Dean and Lieberman is in fact a battle for the soul of the party. Dean believes that in order for the party to beat Bush and win, it must first bring its base back into political activism as well as bring aboard those who havenâ€™t been engaged in politics.

Sen. Joe Lieberman attacked the left wing of his party Sunday, saying Democrats "don't deserve to run the country" if they move left and embrace "the failed solutions of the past."

"If we're for middle-class tax increases, if we send a message of weakness and ambivalence on defense, if we go back to big government spending, if we're against trade [and] for protectionism -- which never created a job -- we don't deserve to run the country," Lieberman, a presidential candidate, said on "Fox News Sunday."

"We're not going to be able to meet the challenges that America faces today."

The Department of Homeland Security, trying to focus antiterrorism spending better nationwide, has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena.

The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack.

They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000; spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500 and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Specific locations are not named because the events could unfold in many major metropolitan or rural areas, the document says.

Translation: Be afraid! This is not real, but it could be, so be afraid! There's more:

The agency's objective is not to scare the public, officials said, and they have no credible intelligence that such attacks are planned.

So what the fuck could they be intending by releasing this? Oh wait....

They didn't.

The department did not intend to release the document publicly, but a draft of it was inadvertently posted on a Hawaii state government Web site.

This would be funny, if it weren't also ... pretty scary. What's also scary is that the Department of Homeland Security, vested with full authority to protect our homeland, managed to publish a secret internal document on the internet.

Of course, scaring everyone is what they're good at.

They're good at lying, too. Regarding their putting out fake news to deceive the public, the Bush Administration folks are not ones to be caught with their pants down -- they've delegated that authority to Jeff Gannon. Thus, this:

White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended the video news releases on Monday as "an informational tool to provide factual information to the American people." Nice sentiment, but why, exactly, wouldn't the administration want to let the people in on one of the most salient facts: who, really, is doing the talking?

[Karen Ryan's] Medicare report, for example, was distributed in January 2004, not long before Mr. Bush hit the campaign trail and cited the drug benefit as one of his major accomplishments.

The script suggested that local anchors lead into the report with this line: "In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare." In the segment, Mr. Bush is shown signing the legislation as Ms. Ryan describes the new benefits and reports that "all people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending."

The segment made no mention of the many critics who decry the law as an expensive gift to the pharmaceutical industry. The G.A.O. found that the segment was "not strictly factual," that it contained "notable omissions" and that it amounted to "a favorable report" about a controversial program.

And that's not all. Perhaps you've already seen ads on your dish or cable feed for The Military Channel? Yes, Disovery has been busy finding ways to make money off the American public's love of our soldiers overseas -- as well as our strange love for weapons that would make Dirty Harry soil his shorts.

The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free satellite feed. Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members.

Meanwhile, fresh off the lucrative passing of the Credit Card Bill, the Republican congress has moved on to other things, like ripping open the Arctic to drilling for what amounts to two days' worth of oil. If the past is any indication, odds are we'll be seeing a "news report" produced by the US Government crowing about how the endeavor that at once destroys a pristine wildlife refuge and provides fossil fuel to be burned into air pollution for all of us to breathe in fact makes the air cleaner and the Arctic Wildlife Refuge even more hospitable for wildlife.

Of course, since hiring reporters to shill for government policiy and producing propaganda to air on the nightly news doesn't seem to be enough, the White House has brought Karen Hughes back to add fresh spin to what the government is really up to.

So it seems that perhaps the Republicans are right: government is the enemy. More specifically, a Republican government is the enemy of the people. Maybe as a follow-up to the scolding he gave to the Crossfire monkeys, Jon Stewart can simply ask the Republicans to "stop hurting America."

Define "America," or is it "Amerika," as we said during the anti-War Movement.

Exactly what is the "burden?" The reason it is a "burden" to help a baby who needs health care is because the American economy is tanking. America is on a spending spree on a war it can't afford and so to win the war against Sadam and his yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction, WMD, Americans have to cut out social services.

Yet, I have to ask, why was this Republic formed? So we can go on foreign adventures? Some of the more forthright Neo-cons admit that they believe the oil in the Middle East is America's oil and it belongs to...what?...America?

To get the price of oil down and to seize the reserves, America has invaded and occupied Iraq--not big news there. But what is the burden? Who pays for this expansionism? Who benefits?

Debora Spar in her [url=http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=2515&t=innovation>[b]Ruling the Waves[/url] and my early essay on Media Girl A View from Partenia recalls the California Gold Rush of 1849. Men came to find gold and they staked out land. But there always was the specter of claim jumpers who would steal the gold.

And it was inefficient for the miner to sit around with a shotgun, guarding the mine. You can't get much mining done that way. You had to hire guards. In fact, why not have "law and order," a great concept that I recall Richard Nixon used to speak about, and get the tax payers to pay for guarding the miner's claim. So, according to Spar's thesis, it is the businesses themselves who ask for government intervention to deal with guarding their gold, and as Jed Clampett found out, "gold" can be black.

So, who pays for guarding the claim of the gold miners? The tax payer! And since the taxes are now going to guard the claim, who can be burdened with caring for the ailing baby? The baby burden is too much.

America's agenda is now the corporate agenda. "What's good for General Motors is good for America," as the fractured quote goes. "What's good for Halliburton is good for Halliburton," and so long as those pesky tax payers foot the bill for America's latest claim jumping, maybe some social services should be sacrificed.

The ironic thing is that those who are the most irate about spending on the poor have not connected that the money is running dry because they are spending on the rich.

I'm bumping this up in response to seeing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Real Time with Bill Maher this week. He actually spoke about the Dominion Theology movement and the fact that the head of the Dept. of the Interior is a member of what he called a group of "Christian Heretics". He cited an "unholy alliance" between polluters like the Coors family trading money for political clout for these Right Wing Extremists. This is not some crack pot conspiracy theory, This is a very real movement that is affecting your quality of life right now and endangering our future.

A Crash course in the Christian Supremacist Movement
I've been doing research on the "Religious Right" this week and at the risk that you think I'm being overly dramatic, I honestly tell you that I'm scared shitless. I think the liberal intelligentsia has failed to grasp what's happening in America. Make note of these words:

Dominion Theology, Dominionism, Dominionist

Kingdom Now theology

the Reconstructionist movement, Christian Reconstructionism

Tribulation, pretribulationism, midtribulationism, posttribulationism

the Vineyard movement

Coalition on Revival (COR)

Charismatic

Evangelical

the Fellowship or the Foundation

Promise Keepers

The Family - described as "an invisible association", who's members include:1

Don Nickles (R., Okla.)

Charles Grassley (R., Iowa)

Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.)

John Ensign (R., Nev.)

James Inhofe (R., Okla.)

Bill Nelson (D., Fla.)

Conrad Burns (R., Mont.)

Jim DeMint (R., S.C.)

Frank Wolf (R., Va.)

Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.)

Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.)

Bart Stupak (D., Mich.)

.

I'm sure the names Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, the late Francis Schaeffer and Billy Graham are familiar. The movement began with them. For a complete background, please read Katherine Yurica's beautifully researched article The Despoiling of America. There are numerous sources on the internet, so I'm just going to distill the main points here.

They want to establish an American Theocracy. Their goal is to remove the checks and balances in the Constitution, and consider George W. Bush to be their leader, installed in his office by none other than "God" himself.

" "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." - Lt Gen William "Jerry" Boykin

"Gen. Boykin has repeatedly told Christian groups and prayer meetings that President George W Bush was chosen by God to lead the global fight against Satan."2

Boykin and Bush are both fond of thinking of the war in Iraq as a "Crusade".

They favor the death penalty in many cases, including things like heresy, adultery, abortion and homosexuality. (BE VERY AFRAID of the fact that Ashcroft is after women's medical records!)

They have been systematically working to gain control of all three branches of government, and have made great inroads thanks to Bush's appointment of these Christian extremists to the judiciary, where they can attack Roe V. Wade and separation of church and state issues, and to key cabinet positions, where they are systematically supressing scientific findings that contradict their ideological goals. They've inplemented a global "gag rule" and are actively campaigning against any organization that promotes condom use or abortion. John Ashcroft's Dept. of Justice won't prosecute hate crimes against minority religions, and they are using the Patriot Act for drug crimes. They refuse to prosecute Christian extremists in this country - even when they blow up clinics - as terrorists. They've been running the Pentagon through the Office of Special Plans.3

They promote the homeschooling of children, so they push for vouchers as a way to destroy the public school system; and they have their own Universities like Liberty U. and Patrick Henry, which are the source of many of the current administration's interns.

They see poverty as God's way of punishing the undisciplined, and they believe that things like lying and cheating are fine as long as it's done to further the return of Jesus. Bush's consultations with Apocalyptic Christian groups concerning his policies on Israel are well documented.

But when he starts invoking church doctrine in a holy war against "evildoers," well, that's enough. If, like me, you happened to have seen the Frontline documentary The Jesus Factor, then you saw the president speak in coded language to his evangelical followers. You saw the president say that the Bible is the "guidebook" for federal social policy. You realized that Bush really does believe he's God's right-hand guy. When you were through shivering with fear in your bedroom closet, you knew for certain that President Bush is a fanatic who will get us all killed if he isn't stopped.
Neal Pollack, Church and State

It's all about the Apocalypse. There's the popular "Left Behind" series of 12 books describing the Second Coming. There's a sort of kid's guide to the end of the world, a "Left Behind" graphic Novel and special Military and Political versions as well. ArmageddonBooks dot com offers the Apocalypse series and End Time novels with names like "666," "Nephilim" and my personal favorite "Jesus, the Computer and New York City." These sell in the millions and they're all about how Jesus will take them to heaven and leave us heretics here to burn.

"When President Bush adds God to their formulation and says God's purpose or intention is somehow linked with American military preeminence, that's a very dangerous thing. [After September 11,] President Bush and the White House basically choreographed a liturgy at the National Cathedral. President Bush was a chief homilist. In the pulpit of the National Cathedral, he made a war speech. He called the nation to arms in the pulpit of the National Cathedral, and he claimed a divine mission for our nation to rid the world of evil. That is not only bad foreign policy or presumptuous foreign policy--I would say it's idolatrous foreign policy to claim God's purpose for that mission. And in the language that Mr. Bush has used, he does this again and again and again. Our role, and his role as president, this is acclaiming a righteous [decree] that Pax Americana is God's foreign policy. This is a very unsettling thing." quoted in Church and State

It's getting hard to tell our Saviors apart, though. I've already linked to the story where the Pope thinks W. may be the Anti-Christ. Then we hear that a coronation was held in a SENATE (!) building with congress people carrying the crowns on pillows as Sun Myung Moon declared himself "sent to Earth . . . to save the world's six billion people. . . . Emperors, kings and presidents . . . have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."4 He's a big time campaign contributor, so the pols in D.C. tolerate him. Or maybe they needed a false prophet? Or maybe George is the false prophet and Sun is the real deal? Maybe they're all fakes? This is making the triple sixes on my scalp itch.

I'm kidding about the 6's, as far as I know, but this is not a joke. The Left is treating these people as a joke, but it's far from funny. We are looking at a new strain of Christian Supremacists and they think they're playing for their very salvation. I live in the South, where these people don't have to resort to the stealth methods that they do in Washington. Most church-going Christians are good people trying to do the right thing. The problem is that good people are easily lead into bad things when their leaders know how to manipulate their fears, prey on the limits of their experience or education, and tell them what they want to hear while they do as they damn well please. These leaders are deeply entrenched in the oil and aerospace industry and many of them are in positions of power. That's a lot of money, a lot of connections, a lot of influence. Enough to send our troops to war for NO reason. Enough to loot our Treasury. Enough to destroy our global alliances and damage our credibility. Call me paranoid if you must, but remember that there were probably Germans who saw what was happening with their crazy little savior, too. I wonder if anyone listened to them?